Brumm Reviews

Schneebäse!

Fun game for the price!

Played game with 3 friends, but the game quits after the round is over. We had to reopen the lobby every time

This game appears to be total waste of money. The amount of content vs. price seems to be off. The weird lag/DPC spikes probably could be done away with if the game had in any way sensible contol scheme. However, the controls work in such way that you POINT into the direction where you'd like to drive. This is unintuitive and completely unlike ANY other top-down view racing game that let you actually steer into the direction you like to steer at.

Brumm is an unabashed, lazy ripoff of Super Sprint (Copyright Atari, 1986). Many lazy "amateur" developers don't pay attention to their obligations under copyright law, and often steal the ideas of actual, real game developers without credit, such as the "developer" here has done. At this stage no legal action has been taken by Atari against the "developer" here, but it's never off the table, as previous copyright law cases have shown. Putting aside the unethical intellectual bankruptcy of stealing someone else's game concept for profit, this is also breaking that unwritten law of stealing other people's game ideas... you should at least try to do better than the game you're ripping off. Brumm is considerably worse than Super Sprint (although it does at least feature multiplayer options... unfortunately nobody ever played the game because it's so bad, see below for the player counts... it's embarrassing). From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using Python (there's Python optimiser stuff in the game files). Don't get me wrong, Python is fine for some things, but as a game engine, it's rarely used, because it's arguably worse than construction kits like GameMaker Studio, RPGMaker and Clickteam Fusion, but it's also much harder to work with. As a game engine, Python has very limited capabilities, which go some way to explaining the poor quality of the game. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a the wrong tool for the job. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 4 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Brumm has the ridiculous, laughable price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $5 asking price for this game could get you games like the "DOOM" and "Tomb Raider" remakes or "Fallout 4". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

Bad multiplayer experience - inviting is complicated, gameplay is very basic, don't buy. Go for Slicks'n'slide instead!

I have been searching for a game like [i]Slicks 'n Slide[/i] for years now, and this is as close as any has gotten. The controls are fine. You can choose between the sensible default 'Relative' controls (thrust, brake, turn left, turn right) and 'Absolute' (accelerates you in the direction being pressed) which... would probably take some getting used to. The handling feels a little wooden. I would've liked some more sliding around corners, but it still takes some skill to get around the tracks fast. The tracks are fine. More would be welcome, of course, but none of them are awful or anything. Rather a handful of decent tracks than hundreds of filler. The camera, like the controls, can be set from 'Dynamic' which zooms in on the action, to 'Static' which shows the entire track on screen. Just like good ol' [i]Slicks 'n Slide[/i] Online play is available, but honestly, I got it for local multiplayer and for that purpose this game is more than worth it. While you can't define your keys (like in [i]Slicks 'n Slide[/i]) at least it allows two players to use the keyboard.